Moixa secures funding for virtual power plant

The UK’s leading smart home battery company, has announced new government funding to expand its pioneering GridShare platform.

Moixa has secured funding from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s Energy Entrepreneurs Fund to expand its platform to manage a wider range of third party home, electric vehicle and IoT batteries.

GridShare aggregates the capacity of several distributed batteries to create a virtual power plant that can deliver services on-demand to the National Grid, helping reduce the costs of delivering electricity and enabling greater adoption of renewables and electric vehicles.

Simon Daniel, CEO of Moixa, said: “By enabling Gridshare to manage other manufacturers’ batteries we will enhance the value of their products and we will offer utilities a one-stop shop for domestic battery aggregation.”

The company has also just been named on the 2017 Global Cleantech 100 Ones to Watch list, which highlights upcoming companies. Earlier this year the company received investment from TEPCO, First Imagine Ventures and a £1m (~€1.3m) facility from Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

Moixa has set a 2020 target of installing batteries in 50,000 UK homes and managing twice as many on GridShare.

Moixa is working with Hitachi on a £10.8m project on the Scilly Isles that will lay the foundations for the archipelago to cut electricity bills and boost renewables by 40%.

It is developing platforms to enable home batteries and electric vehicles to help balance supply and demand within the islands’ energy system.

A trial with Northern Powergrid links 40 home batteries to demonstrate how virtual power plants can relieve pressures on the electricity network and enable more homes to install solar panels without having to upgrade the local network.

The project is expected to halve residents’ energy bills and save millions in the costs of running the UK’s power network.